Dreams in the Clouds
by Cliqett
Summary: The story of Oswin Oswald, powerful Dalek mind hacker, and her adventures seeing the universe. The nanogene cloud is her greatest weapon in the battle of wills between her human consciousness and the Daleks.
1. Oswin: Ascend

Ten seconds.

Oswin huddled against the door, her knees drawn up protectively to her chin and her hands massaging her temples. She spoke into her journal log out of habit, her voice strained.

**"**If everyone would just leave me alone, I could be fine again. There's a lot of talking in my head. In ten seconds, the planet is going to explode. Not too worried about that. I keep hearing words. _Dream_. _It's just a dream, Oswin. Eggs. Dalek. Eggs... Dream... Dalek, you're a Dalek. Eggs... Stir... Men_...

"What absolute rubbish.

"I am human... I'm human, but I have a Dalek body now, and a Dalek understanding of Dalek technology to go with it.

"Time is counting down. I have nine seconds to get my bearings, devise a plan to escape and enact that escape plan. Good thing I've just realized I'm wired to think in measurements of nanoseconds_. _

"I can sift through my options faster than the naked eye could read or even detect them on the computer screen in front of me, ruling out the long shots and. Eggs. Calculating the probability of success based on real-time detection of the progress of the planet's destruction by the ships. The Doctor and his cute companions escaped through the teleport, but. Stir. But that's too far away for me to reach in time. There are no teleports closer to my location. Men. My Dalek casing is able to fly, but it is much too slow to get me out of the danger zone. I would be. Ate. Consumed by the fireball before I got a mile off the ground.

"Maybe I should try to fly anyway, just to see how far I could get before I died. After all, according to the files I deleted, the Doctor's modus operandi is to run, and that seems to be working for him. Moving as far away as possible from the danger sounds logical, but a feeling tells me it's a bad idea. Eggs.

"Stir. No, eggs, no, no, I need to stir think clearly... Men. Ate.

"Five seconds. It's just a dream, Dalek. You've been making souffles in your sleep."

Oswin blinked.

"In my sleep, dreaming! I've been doing all this in my head! The meals, the clothes, and most importantly, the hacking. The part of me that is human, the part of Oswin that is left, is the mind. The rest is just Dalek hardware, and the Dalek hive mind, trying to get in and weed me out. The hive mind has been trying to make me into a full Dalek, that's why they try to break in every night. This place is a dream, or more accurately, a mind fortress, keeping the human in and the Dalek out. So who says the fortress has to be built into this particular Dalek's mind? If thoughts and memories and hatred can go freely from one Dalek to another, never diminishing no matter how many of them die, what's to stop me from riding away from here like a bubble of thought, like a Dalek dream?

"I am human..

"That's why the Daleks really wanted to destroy this place. They felt me in them, a nagging presence in the back of their mind, something foreign. They thought they could chain me up to rot in a loony bin and I'd go away, but that didn't work so they decided to try something more permanent. News flash: also not going to work, Daleks! Oswin is out of here!"

EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINAAAAATE! the agitation of the thoughts outside was tangible. Oswin's room shook to the foundations.

It was a matter of a half second for Oswin to tear open her boarded-up psyche. She threw wide the door to the Dalek hive-mind that had been clamoring to get in and exterminate her. The human mind, a girl dressed in red, towered over the Dalek mind, looking down on its head. One glance and the Dalek consciousness retracted its eye stalk in terror and turned tail and scooted. Oswin latched onto it, the Dalek pulling her mind along like a husky pulling a sled. "mush, you freaky pack of tin cans," Oswin laughed.

Earlier she had felt the Daleks forgetting "the Predator" -the Doctor. Now she concentrated on that same direct line to their collective consciousness. Through the mind of this fabricated Dalek they had tried to turn her into, she had a direct connection to all of them. Any port in a storm; however, Oswin had an idea which port she preferred, and as long as she still had time, she was going to try to locate it.

She landed in a palace. It seemed real, just as her small fortified room had, but it was huge and opulent.

"So this is the Dalek Emperor," she whispered to herself.


	2. Intrude

Metaphysically speaking, Oswin crouched in the Dalek Emperor's head. Her mind stealthily peeked around and began recognizing patterns, memorizing pathways. These were the Emperor's thoughts, and they were massive. Oswin could see- not really see, but sense in a way that she allowed herself to think of as seeing- that the Daleks were big-picture thinkers. The scope of the Dalek thought process started with the universe and broke it up into a precise grid, each portion slated for some part of the larger whole in the Dalek agenda. The difference between the emperor and the rest of the Daleks was that while your average Dalek's outlook on life involved understanding perfectly and fitting seamlessly into his place in the big picture, the emperor Dalek was concerned solely with the big picture itself, and he knew where everyone fit into it. Oswin smiled to herself and whispered, "jackpot."

This was exactly what she was hoping for. While it had come easily to her to work hacking magic from inside the Asylum, the control she could imagine wield ing from in here, in the Emperor's position, was so above and beyond anything she had experienced before. it was so exciting it was almost intoxicating to think about it.

Her awareness detected the nano gene cloud. Huge portions of it had been scattered like dust across the cosmos, propelled by the planet's explosion. Much of it was damaged, melted or completely consumed, but it didn't matter. Like all Dalek technology, if even one nanobot survived, the entirety of the data they all held was intact. Oswin's eyes narrowed menacingly. Her first order of business was to reverse the polarity of that cloud. All those little mechanical microbes, killing people the hard way, sucking their souls out through their thoughts. The cloud sought out emotions and removed them from the host. All Oswin had to do was dig through the cloud's recycling bin. Every thought, emotion, memory and personality of anyone who had ever been converted to Dalek was in there. After that, the programming was simple: make the nano genes spit those out instead of gobble them up.

However, Oswin knew she would be walking on eggshells. The emperor was powerful, and he was pure Dalek, unlike the synthesized Dalek body they had turned Oswin's body into. The slightest pressure she exerted on the data stored in the hive mind could alert him to her presence. Currently her consciousness was sharing living space in his head, and she knew he could absorb her like a sponge absorbing a tiny drop of water if she got too close and their minds actually touched. However, she knew that the only weapon she needed against the Dalek Emperor and his hive mind was her own infinitely creative human mind.

Oswin took a deep breath, centering her mind, and carefully snuck a peek at the inner workings of the nano gene cloud. This thought process manifested in this way: it appeared as if several green holographic computer screens unfolded in the air in front of Oswin's face like a portable command center. Oswin opened one eye and grinned triumphantly when she saw she had achieved the desired result without being detected. The inner workings of the nano genes were laid bare before Oswin's eyes. She began to speed-read columns of code, memorizing them as she saw them, then, gingerly, biting her lip as she held her breath, she tried deleting one digit and replaced it another.

Alarm klaxons roared to life, garish red lights descending and whirling. Unmistakably Dalek voices announced loudly, "IN-TRU-DER! IN-TRU-DERRR!" An orderly phalanx of Dalek guards, projections of the Emperor's mental virus protection program, swarmed down on Oswin's position.

"I was afraid of this," Oswin said. "And that's bad news for you, because that means -" She raised what looked like a bazooka to her shoulder and mowed through the Emperor's mind tricks with a thick, crackling stream of blue and pink electricity - "I was prepared for it," Oswin finished with a dimpled smile.

The Daleks collapsed inward and disappeared like defeated enemies in a video game. Oswin stood tall for a second, brandishing the bazooka. Then a tiny green light pinged to life on her holograph screen, catching her attentino. Soon the dot was joined by countless more. The Emperor was rallying the entirety of the hive mind to help eradicate her from the Dalek mind system. All the hate in the universe was about to come crashing down on her in one fell swoop. Oswin had been afraid of this, too, and had a contingency plan for it.

"Run!" She whispered to herself.


	3. Drawn From Memory

No point in trying to be sneaky now. Oswin began making dramatic modifications to the nano genes on the fly as she ran and dodged Dalek lasers.

The cloud assembled itself on the nearest inhabited planet and immediately began to reconstruct people from its memory banks. Oswin kept an eye on its progress even as she continued to run, zig-zagging, dodging through the Emperor's mind looking for a way to hide.

The Dalek Emperor was angry and focused a great deal of his attention on the awful little voice in his head that was using him to give commands he would never give. What was she saying? Verse. Re. Verse. Verse. Re. Verse. Poe. Re-verse. Poe. Lair. It. Tea. Re-verse pol-ar-it-yy! Re-verse pol-ar-it-yyy!

"Noooo." The Emperor shouted gratingly. He focused hard on what it meant to be a Dalek. He could feel the hate of all the other Daleks. His hate, commanded to them, fed back to him. A powerful - virtually unbreakable - vicious circle.

Oswin ran up against a solid marble wall. She turned. The horde of Daleks that had been chasing her, all blaring hate and threats, had cornered her. She grabbed her head and screamed in pain as the nano gene cloud was wrenched roughly out of her control. The nano genes began destroying the people they had just reconstructed.

Oswin shook off the pain in her head. If now was the time for anything, it was not the time for weakness. It was also definitely not the time for panic. She made a pointed effort to calm herself completely. Staring fearlessly at the Daleks as they closed in on her, she rifled through every plan that could possibly work to save her and defeat the Emperor's mind, allowing her to take over the Dalek mind link.

The Daleks scooted forward, eye-stalks waggling at her, voices raised to a cacophonous screech. EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!

Oswin raised her chin and smiled at them. "Hello, Daleks," she said expansively. "I am Oswin Oswald. I am the Empress of the Daleks."

The Dalek Emperor shuddered. Just when he thought he had her cornered and could eradicate that infiltrating voice, the voice grew huge, louder than anything else he could sense. An unfamiliar emotion filled his entire being.

A sense of companionship.

Oswin brought up the human memories the nano gene cloud had absorbed. She had felt them, and found that touching them once had left all their data in her own memory as well as the Dalek Emperor's brain via her newly instated connection to it. She sifted through the people's hopes and dreams, their happiest memories. She allowed herself to feel deep empathy for all their various emotions throughout their lives.

The wave of confusing human emotions washed over the Emperor from inside his own mind like an epileptic fit. He lay twitching and blinking rapidly. Suddenly, he stiffened and froze, paralyzed by the most foreign emotion his system had ever encountered.

Love. Amy was so full of love. Even the tiniest portion of it absorbed by the nano genes was like an ocean of deadly poison in the Dalek hive mind. Oswin started crying. Fat, hot tears, genuine tears, rolled down her cheeks. She reached out to the nano genes and found herself unhindered by the mortified Dalek mind. She programmed through her tears, sniffing and gasping out sobs even as a painful sort of joy shook her.

Oswin needed something the Daleks couldn't understand or ever defeat. Human connection. It was the opposite of Dalek connection. Even though only a very tiny portion of this Amelia Pond had been uploaded to the nano genes, there was enough to reconstruct a mind similar to Oswin's own mind, a mind capable of intruding into the Dalek Emperor and taking control.

Amy's mind began to manifest in Oswin's field of vision. Oswin could see the shimmering silhouette of her body, thin, standing straight with legs apart, fiery head held high. Oswin smiled, two tears still tracing down her cheeks. She was still deeply affected by all that love, the thing the nano genes had picked up on first which had then spread through them like fire, or like a virus, multiplying rather than being sucked out of her.

Oswin stepped forward as Amy's manifestation solidified. She took her hand. The two human women stood together, smiling triumphantly down at the confused and cowed Daleks. "There's been a regime change," Oswin said.

Amy looked at her and then smiled again down on the Daleks. "Looks like we're going to need a lot of change around here," she said.


	4. Sync

A/N: I have two things to apologize for. One, I am very sorry it took so long to continue writing this story. Two, I am sorry for the gross inaccuracies about the technology/neuroscience(?) involved in this story. I have no idea how nano gene clouds and Dalek mind links are really supposed to work in the whoniverse, so I completely made up a bunch of stuff that probably makes no sense. I hope you don't mind suspending belief for the sake of my little story that is supposed to be about Amy and Oswin teaming up to rule the universe. I promise less pseudo technobabble and more girl power from here on in.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed and favorited! And thank you for being patient while I had massive writer's block on this story.

* * *

"So how does this work, exactly?" Amy asked in her charming accent.

Oswin rolled her shoulder in a shrug. "I'm almost as new to this as you are," she said. "I've only just come to understand my true potential here."

You might not guess it to look at her, but Amy was a quick learner. It was because she was fearless when trying new things. She squared her shoulders and narrowed her eyes, staring down the jittery Dalek mob.

"We can take them," she said, "but then what?"

Oswin smiled. Her new companion was the kind to think ahead a bit, thus nicely compensating for one of Oswin's weaknesses. "What indeed?" Oswin inquired of Amy.

Amy looked at her with widening eyes. She had just been re-created from scratch into a mind-projection simulacrum of Amy, been dropped onto a battlefield outnumbered a thousand to one by Daleks, and now suddenly her new friend, who was unnecessarily gorgeous and, if Amy remembered correctly, had flirted with Rory, was giving her the responsibility of planning their course of action.

"We need to get a message to the Doctor as soon as possible," Amy stated firmly. "He's the sworn enemy of the Daleks, and if he doesn't know we're in one, he could kill us on sight."

Oswin nodded. "Good. That's what we'll do then. And what we'll do now," she said, bracing herself, "is seize control."

One hand gripping Amy's shoulder, Oswin closed her eyes and reached inside for power. Then she reached outward, explosively, to wrest away the Daleks' will power. Oswin's eyebrows scrunched together over her nose as she concentrated hard.

Amy pursed her lips and tossed her head, staring straight ahead. She felt what Oswin was feeling, felt that while Oswin was concentrating, she, Amy, was mirroring the focus. In the first disorienting moment, it felt as though someone else were in control of her body and energies, but she suddenly adjusted, and found that in truth she and Oswin had somehow become two-in-one. Amy could draw power from Oswin the same as Oswin was drawing power from her. When her brain sent a signal, it could move Oswin's arm, and when Oswin's brain sent the signal, Amy's arms shot up in front of her and began to emit electromagnetic force that razed the Dalek army.

It was like they were two computers in sync, both working on the same problem at the same time, each contributing equal amounts of memory to the task. Oswin decided she was brilliant for thinking of this arrangement. Amy thought it was a little creepy. They grinned at each other simultaneously.

The devastated Dalek mind force succumbed almost instantaneously to the women's control. Although it was merely a formality, Oswin stormed briskly into the throne room of the Emperor's mind palace, waved her hand at his twitching, heavily breathing form squatting on the throne, and he vanished like dust blown off the lost moon of Poosh. One corner of her mouth curving into a dimpled smirk, Oswin ascended the dais and sat in the throne.

Like a cell dividing, the throne became two thrones, and Amy sat in a synchronized motion alongside Oswin as they shared a glance of triumph.


End file.
